The judge who oversaw the first Lindsay Clancy murder trial has denied her request to examine evidence about the lone juror voting to convict her before a mistrial was declared last month, in a decision that relies on the Karen Read case.
Earlier this month, Clancy’s attorney, Kevin Reddington, had asked to be able to introduce evidence about the juror at an upcoming hearing, or if not, to push the hearing back. Part of his argument rested on evidence outside the record, but a clerk for the judge had told him he didn’t intend to take evidence at the Nov. 2 hearing.
At the heart of the issue is whether it was proper for Judge William Sullivan to declare the mistrial, given subsequent reporting about that juror’s history with the court system, which may have indicated he lied on his jury form and may not have been part of the jury if he’d told the truth. The juror has since come forward to deny lying on the jury form and hasn’t been charged with anything in connection with the Clancy case.
Reddington has asked to preserve the trial’s juror records and to question the so-called holdout juror.
In Wednesday’s decision formally denying that evidence be introduced in the upcoming hearing, Sullivan said “Clancy seeks an evidentiary hearing to determine whether Juror Doe lied on the jury questionnaire about prior involvement with the criminal justice system.”
Sullivan wrote, “potential evidence of good cause to dismiss a deliberating juror that came to light only after a mistrial was declared simply is not relevant to whether there was a manifest necessity for a mistrial,” adding that manifest necessity is determined, as a judge wrote in the Read decision, “based on what was known at the time of [the judge’s] decision.”
Furthermore, that ruling found that “allowing posttrial juror accounts to affect the analysis ‘would create endless confusion and controversy’ in cases where a mistrial has already been declared due to deadlock,” and Sullivan noted there was no suggestion before the Clancy mistrial about the juror lying on his questionnaire.
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He cited the Read case again, along with another case, in ruling out bringing the juror back for further questioning, writing that courts are not supposed to interfere with jurors’ thinking or deliberations.
The Nov. 2 hearing, where the sides will argue her motion to dismiss the case, will still go ahead, just without new evidence being introduced.
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Clancy has been facing three charges of first-degree murder over the deaths of her three young children. At her trial, her team didn’t deny that she killed the children before attempting suicide, but argued she was in the throes of postpartum psychosis at the time.
Following the mistrial, the Plymouth County District Attorney’s Office hasn’t announced if they intend to proceed with retrying Clancy.
